The Studio CEO: Business Coaching For Yoga & Pilates Teachers & Studio Owners

From The Yoga Boss Vault: Notice Discomfort, Act Anyway

• Jackie Murphy

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You have the desire to build a yoga business, but desire isn't enough—you have to take action. And that's where most yoga teachers get stuck. When discomfort, fear, doubt, or overwhelm shows up, they stop.

In this episode, Jackie Murphy teaches you how to notice that discomfort and act anyway—the single most important skill for building your business.

You'll learn:

  • Why your primitive brain is keeping you stuck (and how to override it)
  • The 3 ways most people handle discomfort (resist, react, avoid) and why none of them build a business
  • How to process uncomfortable emotions the same way you process Chair Pose
  • The difference between massive action (that grows your business) and passive action (that feels productive but doesn't)
  • The one question to ask yourself every day to move the needle forward
  • Why yoga teachers already have the skill they need—they just have to apply it to business

This episode is for yoga teachers, Pilates instructors, and wellness entrepreneurs who want to build a business but find themselves avoiding action when fear shows up.

Listen now to learn how to notice discomfort and act anyway.


Work with Jackie Murphy


SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Studio CEO, the only podcast that empowers yoga and Pilates teachers and studio owners to step confidently into their role as CEO. If you are ready to show up with passion, take your business seriously, and scale to new heights without burning out, you are in the right place. I'm your host, Jackie Murphy, an award-winning certified business coach with over 12 years of experience inside the yoga industry. I have seen firsthand what it takes to build a possible and scalable business. Join me as we dive into strategy, insight, and real-world advice that will help you grow your revenue, build a thriving team, and create a business that serves you as much as you serve your students. It's time to embrace your inner CEO and make more money without working more. This is just the beginning. Hello, it's Jackie Murphy. And before we jump into today's episode, I want to tell you about something I'm running that I think you're going to love. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know I talk a lot about the real reasons yoga and Pilates business owners struggle to grow. And spoiler alert, it's usually not what you think. It's not having the perfect intro offer. It's not your pricing, it's not your schedule or your competitors, or the fact that you're not on YouTube yet. It's your marketing strategy, or more specifically, the three mistakes almost every business owner makes that sabotage growth before it has a chance to really build momentum. So I created a free workshop called The Three Marketing Mistakes Most Yoga and Pilates Studio Owners Make. And in it, I walk you through exactly what those mistakes are, why they're so common, and most importantly, how to fix them. This isn't theory, it's not fluff, it's the exact framework I use with clients who are tired of spinning their wheels and ready to fill their classes and grow their revenue. You can sign up in the link below the show notes. It's free, it's right around an hour, and I promise it's going to shift the way that you think about marketing in your business. All right, let's get into today's episode. This is one of my favorites from the vault, and I think it's going to hit differently after what we've been talking about lately. Hi, friends. Welcome back. Today we are going to dive into embracing discomfort, noticing discomfort, and acting, anyways. This is so, so important, and it'll be literally key for you to build your business. Okay, so today we're gonna dive into exactly that. So perfect. How to take action, even when you notice that you feel completely uncomfortable, even when you notice that you feel discomfort coming along for the ride. This podcast was inspired by my clients, right? I have these amazing clients who are wonderful yoga teachers building their businesses. And I notice that even with them, they have this huge desire to build a business. They have a dream to leave their corporate job. Some of them have already left. They have a dream to make six or seven figures a year. And the desire isn't enough. Like we can't just sit around and think and feel and dream about a yoga business. We actually have to take action. I think this is where I got stuck, quote unquote manifesting. I'm doing air quotes right now, you can't see me, but manifesting for a long time. I would just think and dream and be like, okay, well, where is my yoga business? Why aren't students just knocking on my door, begging to pay for me? And it's a little bit of co-creation. Yes, we want to work with the universe or whatever higher power you believe in, but you also have to do the work. You have to co-create. I like to think about it like this: if you knew that you were gonna go to Hawaii and the universe had it all set up, plane all ready to go, you're definitely going to Hawaii, hotels already booked, everything's gonna be great. You still have to pack your suitcase. And you still have to go to the airport and walk through security and get on the plane and ride the plane and land in Hawaii. It's not just that Hawaii magically arrives at your doorstep. You have to take action and make it happen, right? So the desire is the first step. The second step is taking action, is co-creating. So if you've got this desire, you want to build a business, but you find yourself not taking action, there's a pretty simple explanation of why. We have this part in our brain, I call it the primitive brain. The primitive brain, its entire job is to seek pleasure, avoid pain, so avoid discomfort, and be as efficient as possible. So this part of your brain is literally looking out to find instant gratification, seeking pleasure. It is looking out to avoid any kind of discomfort, any kind of sensation that doesn't feel good. And it's looking out to be efficient as efficient as it possibly can. This primitive brain helped us evolve as humans up to this point. It is the part of your brain that just is solely focused on you staying alive. It's kind of like this part of your brain still thinks that we live in caves and we're chased by tigers and we have to hunt for food every day. This part of your brain is always on let's stay safe, let's stay hidden, let's stay warm, let's get food. Like it's always looking for, wanting to be safe in the cave and taken care of. So this part of your brain was incredibly helpful and still is to some degree. But we're finding that right now in our evolution as humans, this part of our brain is actually holding us back now. When we are just concerned with seeking pleasure, we often just overeat or over-drink or over Instagram. When we're concerned with avoiding pain, we hide, we don't go after our dreams, we don't put ourselves out there, we don't make offers in fear of rejection. And when we're concerned with being as efficient as possible, it's really, really hard to try to do new things that you've never done before. So this part of our brain, while it helped us up to this point, is now holding us back. You have another part of your brain. This part of your brain is called the prefrontal cortex. And it's the part of your brain that only humans have. It's the part of your brain that helps us create and plan and dream. It's the part of your brain that said, hey, let's build a yoga business. So we want to literally rewire our brain. We want to override our programming of our primitive brain and start to go based off the programming from our prefrontal cortex, using that more to intentionally build our lives and intentionally build our businesses. With your prefrontal cortex, you can be with discomfort and still choose to do it anyway. You can be with discomfort and still put yourself out there and build your business. This doesn't mean that your primitive brain will go nice and quietly, just sit in the background. It will sound all of the alarms. It will tell you that you can't do this. It will send you doubt. It'll send you worry. It'll send you fear and overwhelm, confusion, like literally anything insecurity, just as a way to try and get you to stay safe and stop. So we have to be able to have the skill of letting our primitive brain sound those alarms. We have to figure out how to have the skill of feeling that discomfort and taking action anyway. It's letting the sensation be there, letting doubt be there, letting fear, fury, fear or overwhelm be there, letting insecurity be there, and still take action. Now, I love, love working with yoga teachers because you guys already know how to do this. And we teach our students how to do this. You know that in chair pose, holding and breathing chair pose, sensation will arise. When sensation comes up, we know that it doesn't mean that you shouldn't do chair or you can't do chair. It's just sensation. We tell our students all the time like, notice the sensation in your bodies, be with it, breathe into it, don't avoid it, don't resist it. And that's how we get stronger. And then overpractice over time, chair pose, what once was a lot of sensation, will start to shift. And we notice that sensation doesn't stick around forever. So if you can be in chair pose and breathe and let sensation be there, you can also build your business, let doubt, let fear, let overwhelm, and confusion be there, and just notice that sensation. Here's the thing though, as we're growing up, when we deal with sensation, we kind of talked about this in episode two. When we deal with feelings, we grew up learning that feelings came from other people. And on top of that, we typically learn three ways of dealing with feelings, dealing with sensation when we grow up. The first way is resisting, like totally fighting it. It's like trying to keep a beach ball underwater, pushing that emotion down, pushing the sensation down, fighting it, fighting it, fighting it until one day it just blows up. So we learn we can resist. The second thing we learn how to do is react to sensation or react to emotion. And reacting is a lot like acting out the sensation. So when you're mad, it's yelling. Or when you're sad, it's crying. And not crying in a way that's like helpful, that you feel better after, but crying and crying and crying, acting out the emotion, giving the sensation life. The third way that we typically learn how to deal with sensation and emotion is avoiding. And for my generation, us millennials, I see you, avoiding a lot of the times is hopping on Instagram or hopping on Facebook and just scrolling and scrolling. Or hello, Netflix, watching another show or another season or another series, right? Avoiding can also be turning to food, turning to drinking, turning to anything where we trade momentary pleasure for whatever we were feeling, right? We go for that instant gratification instead of letting sensation be there and delaying gratification for later. So I want you to consider when I notice sensation come up, when I notice discomfort come up, what do I tend to do? Do I resist? Do I react? Do I avoid? Maybe you do all three of them. We all kind of bounce between these two. When you're aware of how you have dealt with emotion or dealt with uncomfortable sensation in the past, then you can start to catch it, right? You might find yourself mid-Netflix show and be like, oh, this is because I said I was gonna go to a networking event tonight. I felt uncomfortable and I turned on Netflix. Right? So here's the thing: those three ways of handling discomfort will not build you a business. Those three ways of handling discomfort will keep your primitive brain in the cave. It'll keep you safe. It'll keep you totally out of harm's way, no chance of rejection, no chance of failure. But it won't give you a business. So what we want to actually learn how to do is just process negative emotion or discomfort. We want to learn how to shift almost into meditation mode when we feel that doubt or overwhelm or confusion or worry, whatever negative emotion it is for you, we want to be able to pull back and say, what is the sensation I feel in my body? Like it was chair pose. Can you name it? Where is the sensation? Is it in your legs, in your arms, in your core? Is it tight? Is it moving? Start to watch the sensation from that observer mode with curiosity. When you shift into that curious standpoint, okay, I see the sensation, I know it's here. You pull back, you start to shift into non-attachment. I'm not attached to how I feel. I'm not the same as the sensation that I'm feeling. I'm not the same as the emotion that I'm feeling. There's space between the two. Processing being with discomfort, being with negative sensation is key to building your business. You better bet that when you decide to launch your retreat, you'll probably feel some uncomfortable emotion. You might feel doubt or worry. You might feel scared that no one will purchase. That's okay. You'll feel that sensation. What is it like in your body? You'll be with it, not resist it, not react to it, not avoid it, let it be, observe it, get curious about it, and then act anyway. And this is key, you guys. The acting anyway is how you build a business. When you feel uncomfortable emotion, you can still take action to move the needle forward. Every single day right now, I want you to be asking yourself, what is the next thing I can do to move the needle forward and grow my business? What is the next small step that I can do to move forward in my business? And the answer might be post on Facebook, write a blog post, record a video, meet someone new, go to a networking event, tell someone I offer private. Your answer will come, and then you have to act anyway. Even with sensation there. Even with discomfort there, you can stay in chair pose, right? So even with sensation and discomfort there, you can choose to act anyway. The final piece of this is you want to get really clear on what kind of action you're taking. When you get to asking yourself, what's the next step, what's the next small action that I can take today to move the needle forward, you want to make sure it's action that actually produces revenue, that actually produces students or clients or books your retreat. That is what I call massive action. A lot of yoga teachers that I work with will notice discomfort, right? They get that first part down and then they're like, okay, what action can I take today to move the needle forward? Oh, I know. I'll write a new sequence. I'll change my playlist, I'll study anatomy a little bit. And while all of those actions are amazing and so fun, they don't actually move the needle forward for you making money in your business, for you growing your business. Instead, those actions make you feel like you're being productive, but truly the end result of changing your sequence is just some words rearranged on a piece of paper. Right? Same thing with moving your playlist around. This type of action I call passive action. So get curious. How often are you actually in massive action, moving the needle forward to build your business compared to passive action, which feels productive, but doesn't actually give you a result of growing your business. Now there is a time and place for passive action, right? This can be learning or studying or taking a teacher training. But what I see happen so often is yoga teachers will get their 200-hour certification and they'll say, I want to grow a business, so I know what I'll do. I'll go get my 500-hour certification. The reason I know this is because it's exactly what I did, right? I thought that enrolling in my 500-hour certification was gonna be the ticket to making lots of money as a yoga teacher. Now, the 500-hour certification was amazing. I did it with the Yaks brothers. They actually have a podcast of their own. They're truly incredible. And it didn't necessarily make me more money. I learned, I grew, I studied, I became a better teacher, but right then it didn't build my business at all. So notice your brain when it says, okay, I know the next thing that we should do is study or learn or read or create or listen to a podcast, even. Instead, I want you to always be asking, what is the massive action that I can take? What is the next small step that I can take, even when I feel uncomfortable, even when I feel discomfort arise. Because you guys, if we go back to what we learned in episode one, your actions give you your results. What you do and what you don't do is truly going to create your result, how much money you make, how you book your retreat or you don't. So your actions matter. Your actions are so, so important. So I want you to consider today. What is the next small step? What is the next small thing that you can do to move the needle forward, to build your business today? Then when your brain comes up with something, know that that's coming from your prefrontal cortex, from the highest part of your brain, the brain that the brain that's thinking and planning, and your primitive brain will freak out. I can't do that. That's scary. What if I fail? What if I get rejected? That's okay. Let your primitive brain freak out. Pull back, shift into the observer mode. Everything's okay. You're not being chased by a tiger. It's not life or death. Let your primitive brain pause and take action anyway. Y'all, I want to hear how this works for you. So find me on Instagram. It's Jackie, J A C K I E G dot Skinner. S K I N N E R. Send me a message. Send me a screenshot of your review for a chance to win that Apple Watch, which will be absolutely amazing. And let me know what you are doing today to grow your business. See you in episode four.